Vintage books China Dream Ma Jian

Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his student days at Beijing University • As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred • ‘Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century’ Chris Patten

Mehar, a young bride in rural Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. It is 1929, and she and her sisters-in-law - married to three brothers in a single ceremony - spend their days hard at work on the family farm, sequestered from contact with the men. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk • Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home?

The hugely influential book that set Ma Jian on the road to exile from China • 'Outstanding' Irish Times • A Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover to the walls of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between fact and fiction becomes confused and the man is drawn deep into an alien culture he knew nothing about, and which haunts his dreams

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life • For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child

A searing novel that traces the destruction of a community in communist China • Told through the eyes of Xiao Qiang, a young boy, this deeply moving novel shares the tragic story of the blood-contamination scandal in China's Henan province • Looking for a way to lift Ding Village from poverty, its directors and organisers open blood-plasma collection stations, hoping to sell the plasma to those in need. At first the scheme is a commercial success. Soon, however, whole communities are wiped out after contracting HIV. As Xiao narrates the fate of Ding Village, his family is torn apart by suspicion and retribution

This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’ • One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere • Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose • Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping

A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China • A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau • The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the ‘Wastepaper Queen’ • Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China’s story – one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control • Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Rolls Royces and Ferraris yet the word ‘luxury’ is banned from billboards

Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans • They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history • Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair • Little Sister became first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China • Big Sister made herself one of country's richest women • Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister takes us on a sweeping journey from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China

The first global history of Maosim that explores Maos' life, ideas, influence and legacy as a power that shaped the world well beyond the borders of China • 'A landmark work giving a global panorama of Mao's ideology filled with historic events and enlivened by striking characters' Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of China • Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao's revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People's Republic. With disagreements between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing • A crucial motor of the Cold War: Maoism shaped the course of the Vietnam War and brought to power the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; it aided anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa; it inspired terrorism in Germany and Italy, and wars and insurgencies in Peru, India and Nepal, some of which are still with us today

Selected as a Book of the Year by The Times and The Economist • China's history is an epic tapestry of courtly philosophies, warring factions and imperial intrigue. Yet, over five thousand years, one ancient element has so dramatically shaped the country's fate that it remains the key to unlocking China's story. That element is water • In The Water Kingdom Philip Ball takes us on a grand tour of China's defining element, from the rice terraces and towering karts of its battle-worn waterways, to the vast engineering projects that have struggled to contain water's wrath. What surfaces is the secret history of a people and a nation, drawn from its deep reverence for nature's most dynamic force

In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician - and hundreds just like them - are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books • But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive. Divided into four narratives, The Four Books tells the story of the Great Famine, one of China’s most devastating and controversial periods

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them' • At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel • Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it